Chinese artist’s ‘ugly’ doll photos metaphor for Chinese people’s anguish; exhibit in NYC

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

02/08/2012

Chinese artist’s ‘ugly’ doll photos metaphor for Chinese people’s anguish; exhibit in NYC

NEW YORK — Liu Xia is a forbidden artist whose work is censored in her native China. The photographer, who is under house arrest, uses life-like dolls as metaphors for the pain and suffering of the Chinese people.

Liu knows what it is to work in an oppressed society. Her husband is Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner jailed in 2009 for 11 years for urging democratic reform in China.

But Liu’s photographs are not about her husband, said Guy Sorman, a friend of the couple and curator of an exhibition of her works opening at Columbia University on Thursday evening.

“This is not about politics first. It’s about art first. Her husband is his own story. She is a major Chinese artist who happens to be the wife of Liu Xiaobo,” Sorman said in a telephone interview from Paris.

The 25 photos were spirited out of China just before Liu was placed under house arrest at the end of 2010 after her husband was awarded the Nobel prize.

Read more at The Washington Post

Feb 8, 2012 4:21:07 PM | Art

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